I’ve known designers who place their pricing at about double anyone elsein the area. It works. They are good — and if the client wants thatlevel of work, then they know it’s going to cost. So, in my point of view, the design price totally depends upon the project, and how much work i do for theproject and also include other factors like extra work if given by theclients, Or just ask the clients about their budget and do the designingas per that.

People who make things to sell so often fail to account for their total costs, including the cost of their labor. As a one-off item, the true cost certainly isn't $4. You might be "out of pocket" $4, but that isn't your cost.

Thank You for the explanation, your post is very helpful and "instructable."

I am confused why someone could not distinguish the difference between an effort that is helpful and self-serving spam. If you work for the company, it is even better, I expect the information to be more accurate.

Actually, as I see now, there are several of these tutorials on this site from this person...selling the same site product. This person needs to be banned as they are breaking the terms and conditions of this site. How about it, Instructables??

As it was not stated at the gitgo that this person worked for this company and then the tutorial introduced....it has major SPAM and despiration for clients written all over it. For SHAME! It would have been nice to see this tutorial with some truth in front of it. It's always best to be upfront right away.

I still don't quite understand Ponoko...it's confusing to me, I'd like a tutorial to understand how the thing is supposed to work. They make the designs that you give them into products? Do people buy directly from their site instead of from you...confusing.

This doesn't feel too spammy to me, mostly because I'd love to figure out how to use Ponoko. My biggest complaint is that if someone wanted to make a few different small items this doesn't seem to be the way to do it; the making cost is too high for personal use.

Thanks for your comments guys - I work with Dan (aka the author of this Instructable) at Ponoko. We'd surely welcome a category as per your suggestions - we do always check with Eric before posting. Y'know the reason we use Instructables is because it's a great and easy way for us to prepare and present this info for our own users. Is there any one (or more) thing that we can do that would improve our Instructables in your eyes?

'Fess up from the get-go that this is posted by someone who works for Ponoko. Cuz it's still great info to have, but now I feel like I don't want to use it because it wasn't presented in an up-front way.

Sure it instructs a lot, but it is still advertising for a service. All of this author's I'bles send you to the same website, so they all look like SPAM to me? I think there should be a special category for the Instructables that happen to have Instructable value but at the same time advertise their products and services. Dremel just posted five that fall into this category.